A microblog by Chris Rosser.
12/01/2022 — Short story
Hmmm, this ‘short story’ I’m drafting might end up being 10k words of more…
I think I might have to release it in stages to my member.
12/01/2022 — Today’s walk
Workout summary -- walk 12/01/2022 at 17:35:45 - 18:17:18
Completed a walk of 4.03 km in Ringwood with an:
8/1/2022 — Story plan
Working on a new short story plan, penciled out in the Notes app on my iPad. The story is the first of a series I’m writing my members while I find myself between drafts.
07/01/2022 Reordering Ulysses
This afternoon I decided to reorder my Ulysses library around content types rather than publishing targets. This should encourage me to write with reuse in mind, as well as making things easier to find. I’m also restructuring my stories folder as I migrate from Scrivener to Ulysses.
2022-01-07 Microblogging
I’ve relaunched my tales.chrisrosser.net as a microblog, and will be folding my RossersBoot.com site here too as a place to log my workouts.
This new setup omits DropBox and publishes straight from Ulysses to Netlify via a shell script and Git.
2022-01-06 Back walking
It’s 2022 and I’ve started walking again. This afternoon I took my son with me, and he showed plenty of guts in face of hot and humid conditions!
Workout summary — Walk 06/01/2022 at 18:18:59 - 19:20:12
Completed a walk of 4.07 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-18 Weekly activity summary
Yesterday, I took my first stab at making a Python script that extracts my weekly activity summary from Today’s Plan to my favouriting writing app, Ulysses. It’s based on the same code as my last activity workflow, though I’m calling different endpoints and getting a series of data I have to aggregate. I trigger the scripts using Bunch, which is rapidly turning into my favourite macOS automation tool.
So far, so good. The output is below, which I’ll likely tweak to accommodate scheduled workouts when I start using them in Today’s Plan.
Summary for 18/10/2021 — 24/10/2021
2021-10-25 Puffing hard
I started my third week with a run, and honestly, I was puffing pretty hard after the first three kilometres. I'm not sure what went wrong, as I only just managed to under the 7 min/km pace. Looks like I have a long journey ahead of me.
Workout summary — Run 25/10/2021 at 17:36:53 – 18:05:18
Completed a run of 4.03 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-22 Hot and muggy end to the week
I’m sweating like a pig, but surprisingly, I’m not feeling too bad, even though that was pretty tough. I'm slowly starting to adapt to running, but it’s still a slog at my weight, and my joints and tendons are starting to protest. I’ll spend some time this week, thinking about the beginnings of some kind of training plan.
Workout summary — Run 22/10/2021 at 17:11:12 – 17:43:51
Completed a run of 4.08 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-20 Warming up
Yesterday, I pulled a 12 hour day at work and didn’t get a chance to do my 30 minutes of exercise. Today, I clawed some hours back and went for my usual 4 km run. Although the day started cold, it warmed up by the afternoon topping at 23 degrees C when I set out for my run. I had to walk up one of the inclines, but I don’t think I did too badly over all.
Seeing stats, I think I can get my pace down to 6:30 minutes a kilometre. It’s certainly a decent goal to work on the short-medium term.
Speaking of goals, I did my first weigh in on Sunday and I’m down to 98.8 kilos. I’m going to create a script that builds a weekly summary of my stats, but that’s a job for next time.
Workout summary — Run 20/10/2021 at 17:11:26 - 17:41:09
Completed a run of 4.03 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-15 Foul-weather Friday
There’s nothing quite like foul weather to motivate yourself to exercise — odd I know, but I like running in the cold and wet. This week’s weather comes curtesy of a La Nina event on Australia’s eastern seaboard states.
The temperature was a chill 9 degrees centigrade, and the rain came at me sideways. Running through it motivated me to run my best pace in quite some time, and I don’t feel too bad in the aftermath — though I do have to dry my running shoes for tomorrow’s walk.
Speaking of setting records, that reminds me, I need to update my script to pull down activity achievements from Today’s Plan. That’s a job for the weekend though.
Workout summary — Run 15/10/2021 at 16:50:15 - 17:22:55
Completed a run of 4.54 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-14 Quick power walk
My wife needed to get to a shop before 6 tonight, so I walked my staple 4 km route as fast as I could. The result was only about was only about 6 minutes slower than my jogging pace, but I could keep this up for quite some time. There really is something to be said about walking as the best form of cardio one can do.
Workout summary — Walk 14/10/2021 at 16:28:15 - 17:12:44
Completed a walk of 4.11 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-12 Walking at 5yo speed
I finished working later than usual today, but still wanted to get in my 30 minutes of exercise. I got conned into taking my 5yo daughter because she was causing mayhem in the house. So, whereas a half-hour way usually gets me about 3-3.5 km, I had to make some adjustments.
She didn’t want to go, but my wife convinced her by letting her have a muesli bar and a mini hiking bag, which includes a water bladder.
So, not the best workout in terms of performance, but it was a nice recovery after yesterday’s run, and spending time with my daughter is priceless.
Workout summary — Walk 12/10/2021 at 17:38:15 – 18:14:49
Completed a walk of 2.32 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-13 Running and cycling (sort of)
While my sons were doing Taekwondo over zoom, I took my daughter for a run, only she was on her bike and I got to puff after her for a couple of laps until she got sick of it and went inside.
It’s not a bad way to exercise — her constant stopping and starting made it a bit like a fartlek session, though I was remiss in not logging them as intervals on my Apple Watch. I’ll have a think about how best to do them after I get over this week.
My feet and legs are a bit sore today, but I’m not doing badly considering.
Workout summary — Run 13/10/2021 at 17:02:29 - 17:41:00
Completed a run of 4.54 km in Ringwood with an:
2021-10-1 First run in ages
Yesterday afternoon, I went for my first run in ages. I wanted to get a sense of how poor my cardiovascular fitness is, so I set off on the route that used to be my staple run — a 4km loop from my house, along part of the Eastlink Trail and back again.
I didn’t do as badly as I thought I would, and don’t feel too sore today — or at least nothing a bit of stretching and recovery walk tonight won’t fix. I logged the run on my Apple Watch and uploaded it to my Today’s Plan account for processing. The results below, I’ve extracted from Today’s Plan via its API with a Python script I’ve written to format the results as markdown for this here blog.
Blogging my activities is part of my strategy to keep me honest, so this script will make it easier for me to write and automate these posts. I’ll revisit this topic later.
Workout summary — Run 11/10/2021 at 17:47:15 - 18:19:44
Completed a run of 4.29 km in Ringwood with an:
2020-11-10 Small tales
An experiment in micro fiction blogging.
After an old school friend shared her flash fiction collection with me, I was inspired to create a zero-friction, ultra minimalistic micro-blogging site.
This is the result. It's hosted on Netlify with the build triggered each time I dump a file in a certain folder in my Dropbox account.